NEWS: Porn Again

CULTURE: Porn Again

Most of us remember the first time we saw pornography. Sometimes the images are etched into our memory. Every time we see another porn, in the back of our minds that specific movie is replayed. But now, young people are so desensitized to porn that it they are becoming unfazed by explicit sexual images.

While young people are increasingly comparing their body image to porn actors (despite gender), I mourn the lost of a hidden Playboy in the bottom of a closet.

Now Jimmy, we have to talk...
I was going through your history folder the other day and...

I wonder if the decrease in sexual activity among children has anything to do with some of those violent, explicit, and degrading images.

Violent porn? Most of the porn on the Internet is pretty, well 'normal' aside from minor harmless fetishes! I have some skepticism toward this crackpot.

Me too, he makes it sound like all these 15 year old kids are looking at is gagged bound women and are learning from that. Sounds like crap to me.

Are they punching the monitor while they look at it?

I gotta go with you on this one. Internet Porn is very homogenous. It is as much the same from one page to the next as one can of Bud is like to the next. Why? Because they do what sells. It is a shame to say that men are so shallow and predictable, but that is probably true of our sex behavior. Sure you encounter some wierd fringe stuff in a serious survey of net porn, but it is minimal. Most of it is very like the last and the next. Beauty, and reproductive ripeness seem to be factors that no-one really mentions, but which figure prominently. The ol' biological imperative at work.

There is a lot of old skool feminist and social theory thinking that points to pornography as violence, and the depiction of women without their clothing -especially in sexually provocative poses- as being demeaned, made vulnerable, and harmed psychologically. While most readers at this site would argue effectively against the paper tiger of those ideas, which don't really hold up, given the sexual complexity and just general lustiness and dirty mindedness of the average actual human being. Still, I am gonna say there's something to it, as well.

This article points to something that has more than a ring of truth. The internet is changing our behaviour around sex, along with everthing else. Irrevocably, perhaps. Interesting.

I think it's right to be skeptical of this kind of study, because no matter how well conducted, and no matter who conducted, they will always find more of what they are looking for than what they arent.

i've been trying to desensitize myself to porn for YEARS

it's done no good

This is unconvincing.

Generate?

Unless you're specifically seeking tied women out (in which case you already know what you like and can't really blame porn for it) you're going to see a LOT of other types of stuff too.

I strongly believe that the mystification of sex hurts adolescents far more than porn does.

While young people are increasingly comparing their body image to porn actors (despite gender), I mourn the lost of a hidden Playboy in the bottom of a closet.
you mean "loss" not "lost"

and yeah, kids these days. it's kinda sad. *shakes head*

I would too. But nobody has only that as a reference point.

The more porn people look at, the more different kinds of porn they'll see, and the broader their perspective will become.

I remember when porn seemed like this far off thing that people only talked about. Playboys were seen once or twice at a friends house or very high up in a magazine rack. It was hard to come by at all. The amount of free porn on the net is crazy. It's everywhere. I'll stop before I start saying things like "why I remember back in the day the only porn I had was a fredericks of hollywood catalog I stole from my friends house...and thats all i needed concarnit"

you just described the whole idea of the 'size queen' except in reverse.

I always liked porn, I've always been fascinated by sex. I remember at young ages being in my crib in my parents room (this might account for some of my psychological issues, come to think of it) fantasizing about having sex with cartoon women. I guess what the point I'm getting at is, if all you know is porn (no matter how vast of a selection you have) and imagination, there's gonna be some sort of issues, or hurdles, or misunderstandings. It's something that's made fun of in teen movies all the time, I mean come on, the pie people, how can you forget the pie? Porn isn't real sex 99% of the time, it's fabricated by imagination, that's sex filtered through at least two seperate people's imaginations, I know that porn kept me from being comfortable sexually for a very long time. Bah before I babble any longer, I'll just stop and assume I've made some sort of point already.

I think most human beings can separate fantasy from reality--that kind of pornography was my only reference point, and I have yet to ejaculate anything on anyone's face or engage in most porn star behaviors (admittedly I don't have a penis large enough for some of them). I think people who are attracted to the idea of sexual domination will continue to act out their dominant fantasies (or subordinate fantasies, if they are they opposite); while people like me, who prefer sex to be an act between partners will continue to to have sex in that way, regardless of what the internet teaches or fails to teach us.

[Edited on Apr 27, 2005 11:40AM]

I agree. I'm so sick of porn these days because it seems that all that is out there is girls being stabbed and gagged with cocks. I could only imagine what kind of effect this could have on young kids, and I do think it has an effect. Wasn't there some news bulletin out of Germany about teen boys being confused because they couldn't last as long as the guys in porn?

[Edited on Apr 27, 2005 2:51PM]

Ah, but, by and large, rapists do not look at porn. Rape, of course, is what researchers are going after. Japan is indulated with porn, much more so than us, and yet they have twenty times less rape. Rapists also tend to come from sexually uptight families.

Fetishes, paraphilias, come from sexual repression and not sexual expression. I went to college to be a Criminal Profiler and so I took classes on this stuff.

maybe it's not so much the explicit images they are desensitized to, so much as the sanctioned violence towards women?

dAhmer wrote:

<nods> On a whim, I went into an "Adult Superstore" the other day to see if I wanted to pick anything up - I usually just pick the odd Playboy SE at a local (Comic)Book store. I browsed through the entire store and everything seemed to be of the type previously noted.
I was kind of hoping there'd at least be a small section devoted to more softcore stuff, but I think the softest I found was some Latin Lesbian video (oh, and some back issues of Playboy).

<shakes head> I have to concern with those I've quoted - The selection of available porn is heavily biased to the hardcore end of the spectrum. Of course, this could be why the few sources of quality softcore do so well.

Let's not delude ourselves. I was surprised that I had to scroll down so far to find a comment that acknowledged the degree of sexual violence easily accessible on the internet. Webpages are covered in images of women wincing with dicks down their throats and text that boasts of "pounding her tight vigin ass." I can find (actually, hardly avoid) images of women tied up, gagged, gagging, cummed soaked, fisted, double penetrated, even often photoshopped images of mutilated female bodies posted in the context of sexual arousal. It would have been VERY difficult to find such images twenty years ago. Let's not pretend that porn and sexual violence are not more easily accessed and more extreme now than in the recent past.

That said, the EFFECT of this is unclear. We have no idea if this is causing more sexual violence among individuals outside of the "industry." We don't know if this is having positive or negative effects on "young, impressionable minds." Internet pornography does disproportionately represent sexuality as something that happens TO women as sexual violence. I mean, most of us have had real sex. How often do you get a deep throated blow job while standing up from a young virginal 18 year old who likes it when you grab her hair and then cum in her face? Anal sex is generally done slowly, with communication, and should be pain-free. Seriously, how often has your partner let you "pound his/her tight, virginal asshole?" Internet porn rarely portrays true human sexuality. Suicide Girls is a wonderful exception to the rule. Also, visit www.goodvibes.com for some healthy, sex-positive feminist sexuality. There are many other wonderful examples. There are many, many, many more examples of the more "violent" and VIOLENT forms of sexuality online. Is it good or bad? It's hard to believe it could be a good thing for women (or for men, really). But I'm not sure it is measurably a bad thing. Either we'll see, or we won't. It's extremely difficult to get funding to study sexuality, and then getting people to participate and be honest is even more difficult.

Anecdotally, how many of you women have ever been "fucked" by a boy who had obviously learned his "skillz" from too much internet porn? Was it good for you?

[Edited on Apr 27, 2005 4:20PM]

I don't recall the first time I saw porn, but I was indeed very young. I became addicted to it in a sense, as it was my only way of rebelling against my parents-- as otherwise I generally held tight to the rules. But surfing the internet for porn was exciting, watching it made me feel like I had control of something. But I do wonder how it effected my sexual development, and how I currently view sex as a whole. It would be interesting to see how this has effected myself and my peers, if they too used the internet to look for porn at a young age.

That made me shoot soda out my nose. I'm a bad person.

I have to say all the porn I can find on the Internet is pretty vile...

Not to say all porn ever is pretty vile but the Internet variety does seem obsessed with the concept of the Biggest Cocks hitting As Many Holes As Possible with the aim of leaving everything Drenched In Cum...

Which is not always the point... at least for me anyways.